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£24 PB NEW TITLE

228 x 152 mm
704 pages, 2,300 entries
MARCH 2014
beginner / intermediate
978-1-56836-526-8
The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course
A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering 2,300 Characters

漢
author: Andrew Scott Conning
foreword: Jack Halpern, author of The Kodansha Kanji Dictionary
and The Kanji Learner’s Dictionary & originator of the System of £24 Softcover
Kanji Indexing by Patterns - ‘SKIP’
Kodansha
228 x 152mm; 704 pages, for beginner / intermediate Europe Ltd.
isbn: 978-1-56836-526-8 BIC: YQF 2GJ

The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course is an innovative and highly effective system for learning and remembering kanji, or Sino-Japanese

字
characters. It contains all 2,136 Joyo kanji (Japanese government designation for kanji in common usage) plus 164 of the most useful
non-Joyo kanji, specially arranged to maximise efficiency of acquisition.
One of the book’s key features is its mnemonic devices—original stories for each kanji that teach you to associate graphical components
with images linked to the character’s meaning. With these, students will find it hard to forgot the nuances of the kanji they’ve studied,
and more than likely they will even find it easier to decipher the meanings of unfamiliar compounds that contain those characters.
Another unique feature is the author’s emphasis on comparing similar-looking kanji as a means of differentiating them. Most kanji
dictionaries and textbooks arrange their entries in ways that do not address the needs of non-native learners, such as by traditional
radical or by the grade in which the kanji are taught in Japanese schools. The Kodansha Kanji Leaner’s Course uses a unique sequence
that presents look-alikes one after the other, and presents the building blocks before the complex kanji they appear in.
This book fills an urgent need for a timesaving, yet reliable, kanji-learning system that can be used from beginner through to advanced
levels. It is intended for anyone who is serious about learning to read and write Japanese.

を
• Includes 2,300 kanji entries; teaches the
meanings, readings, and usages of all 2,136
government-prescribed Joyo Kanji
• Offers clear and systematic guidelines to
help in visualising the meanings of the charac-
ters as they are encountered
• Introduces kanji components in a logical,
step-by-step order, with related kanji grouped
together

理
• A super user-friendly kanji learning system
for ALL learners that is perfectly dovetailed
with The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary
(978-1-56836-407-0; £30 PB).
• Includes full cross-referencing with kanji
listed in The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Diction-
ary and incorporates core meanings, character-
meanings, readings, and sample vocabulary
from the dictionary
• Written by Andrew Conning, in associa-

解
tion with Jack Halpern, Editor-in-Chief of The
Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary and The
Kodansha Kanji Dictionary (978-1-56836-408-
7) who is a highly-respected world authority in
the field of Japanese language-learning
• 10 original appendices
Andrew Scott Conning is a doctoral candidate and
Presidential Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education. He received a bachelor’s degree in languages
from Georgetown University (USA) and a master’s degree
in social anthropology from the Escuela Nacional de An-
tropología e Historia (Mexico). He has been active in Ja-
pan as a lecturer and university administrator, and most
recently as a research scholar at the University of Tokyo.